[EM] Unranked-IRV, Cumulative, and Normalized Ratings

Richard Moore rmoore4 at home.com
Tue Apr 10 19:10:34 PDT 2001


Martin Harper wrote:

> Richard Moore wrote:
>
> > ...unless the voters let the system do the strategizing for them.
> >
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> >
> > would the voters have any reason to give insincere ratings
> > (assuming they understand and trust the system)?
>
> They might want to give insincere ratings to try and distort the strategies of
> their co-voters, in the same way that (say) in Approval polls you reduce your
> willingness to compromise. The fact that you have to make the same vote in the
> 'poll' as in the final vote reduces such options, though - which'd make it harder
> to do - but not impossible.

I thought of the possibility of distorting the opposing strategies, but to do this
you have to fool the method's predictor, and to get to the predictor you have
to go through the strategizer first. You can't fool the predictor without fooling
the strategizer, and if you fool the strategizer you wreck your own strategy. So
I suspect it might not just be harder, it might be impossible.

> > convergence
>
> Isn't there a theorem in game theory which says that all games must have at least
> one attractor? Does this apply to the 'game' of voting, which'd show that we'd
> always get convergence?

I don't have the answers to these questions. There may be such a theorem but
I'm not familiar with it. But I don't believe that the presence of an attractor
guarantees convergence. The attractor might only force the system into a stable
orbit. And if there are multiple attractors?

Richard




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